Philip Gets Laid

Her name was Shnarka. She first told it to me with a bold snideness, as she stepped gracefully on my toes and commented, with refreshing frankness, on my pre-mature balding. Of course I knew her name already, having found it out from the police report she had filed against me after our first meeting. I had both the good luck, and the grave misfortune to first encounter her, in a very bodily manner, one wonderful evening in the woman's restroom at McDonald's.

I: tip-toeing gracefully into what I believed was the most apt place to hide from an enraged and urine-scented bag lady, whom I had, moments earlier, attempted to slip several counterfeit twenty dollar bills to. Shnarka: sitting blithely on the toilet, pants disengaged from marvelous ass. And, in that supremely mundane moment, both of us caught up as we were in the routine of our everyday lives, we stared at each other in mute shockedness as if nothing else mattered. In that second, that millisecond, that infinitesimally tiny portion of time in which our eyes locked, immediately before Shnarka began clawing my face and hollering, I believe we fell deeply, profoundly and, in her case, completely subconsciously in love.

There was a screaming contest between the two of us, and I quickly retreated to the safety of the grievously deceived bag-lady, who, in turn, enthusiastically pepper-sprayed me. It truly is, I think, a terribly cynical indication of our times that the homeless have found it necessary to carry counterfeit detector pens. And, in general, why are the homeless always so upset? It's another of God's stupid mysteries. Unfortunately for me, I can't pass by one of their wretched homeless kind without being overwhelmed with wretched sympathy, at which point I quickly and, occasionally, apologetically hand over the entire contents of my wallet. Being brutally employed at the time, as a customer service representative for an online pornography distributer called www.fuckingonstilts.com, this sort of expenditure was not, for my bank account, what could be labelled as "sustainable," or, honestly speaking, "possible more than once." And so I began to carry a special, counterfeit wallet, filled with counterfeit credit cards, made out of alluringly shiny aluminum foil, and counterfeit money as well. And so I could give away everything, without really having to give away anything at all. It is, of course, the best to have it both ways at once. Especially if it doesn't cost any money.

Shnarka haunted me. I found myself repeating her name at the oddest of times. At the hot dog stand where I took my lunch daily, I ordered a "Shnarka in a shnarka with the works." The hot dog vendor rolled his eyes provocatively, giggled, and served me a double cheeseburger. An ennobled, magical spirit, my hot dog vendor guessed at my troubles with his appealing miscreant charm: "Trying to get your dick wet, aren't you?" He asked, his lazy eye rolling wildly, perhaps charged with the mysterious joy of a new love, which is often contagious and requires heavy doses of cough syrup to alleviate. Nothing made sense to me anymore, having encountered the shrieking Shnarka. As I watched the hours and hours of online pornography at work, making sure our Web site was working right, I couldn't help but imagine her being brutally manhandled in disgustingly slippery sexual situations. Having no way to contact her, I despaired, and I waited with supreme trepidation to see if she wanted to press charges against me. When it seemed apparent that she would not be sending me to jail, I despaired anew, feeling that opportunity had passed and that I would never see her again. Then, one night at 3 a.m., as I was busily conducting off-duty research into a rival porno distributor's Web site, I was struck with inspiration. The police had been called after our initial meeting! Surely, despite her foregoing the pressing of charges, Shnarka had given over her personal information! The next morning I hurried to the station and requested the police report. And there it was: her full name! "Shnarka Zoltran-Schmidts," I muttered nasally, "you will be mine!"

Twenty minutes and one Internet search later, I knew almost everything you'd ever care to know her. I found her blog, her various Internet community sites and several dozen of her childhood pictures. So that evening, after another long, hard, sweaty day at work, I went to her favorite bar and tried to carefully engineer a chance encounter. It's more difficult than you might think. Several times, she'd glance up and see me "accidentally" about to ram into her, and she'd quickly change directions. Finally I managed to corner her at the bar, where she was trying to pay for her drink. I waited for her to hand her money to the bartender before charging at her, so I could be assured she wouldn't walk away. I managed to take her by surprise.

"Hey! What are the odds of us meeting like this? Incredible!" I snickered charmingly as I walked up. Unfortunately I tripped over a barstool, and splashed my drink all over her shirt. She shouted in alarm, and I immediately grabbed some napkins to try and wipe the drink off of her great, supple boobies. She hurried out of the room and I followed, screaming my apologies. As we went outside, I courteously offered her my pants. She looked at her shirt and groaned.

"You had to be drinking a raspberry vodka, didn't you?" She said with some angst. I introduced myself and immediately invited her back to my place for a night cap.

She studied me curiously and said, not without mirth, "Aren't you the guy who attacked me in the bathroom? Are you my stalker?"

"Yes," I admitted, "I think that I love you. I don't want to be presumptuous, or move things between us too quickly, but I believe that you love me back, and that you want me to father your children."

She laughed now, "Children? God, did my mother send you? Are you a part of her 'Grandma by 60' plan, or something?"

"It is more than likely that she steered me to you psychically," I mused.

"Yeah? Well, judging by your outfit, you're probably a nice Quaker boy. My parents would love that!"

I panicked, sensing that I was losing her. If she was anything like the other girls I had had the good fortune to bone, when she associated a boy with her parents it meant she thought he was not bone-able. "I don't care what your parents think," I exclaimed, annoyed, "let's fuck!"

"Whoa," she held me back as I attempted to break dance with her. "So you're a nice, sexually liberated Quaker boy."

"I'm liberated," I panted exuberantly. "I'm post-liberated. I won't even ask what your gender is before I start freaking you." She thought that was funny, but I could tell by her body language that she was still not willing to stand within a five foot proximity to me. Getting desperate, I resorted to some lines: "My tantric energy is set on 'Stun.' Some people call me Maurice. I can ejaculate for up to 10 minutes, if you put my hand in a bowl of hot water. If you have sex with me, you'll get a complimentary breakfast and a day-pass for www.fuckingonstilts.com." She still wasn't sold. I began singing some Teddy Pendergrass.

"Why don't you start by telling me your name, Mr. Liberated?" She asked me with a smirk.

"Billip Orlame," I mumbled suavely, shaking her elbow as I attempted to draw her close to me.

"I'm Shnarka," she said as she stepped on my toes with graceful deliberateness, "I like your bald spot."

We exchanged a few more of these pleasantries before she fled, losing me by climbing up a fire escape and jumping onto a moving bus. But she did, before making her getaway, give me an email address to send my STD test results to. So I had reason to hope. And, in that spirit of semi-triumph, I spent all the next day floating happily between nonsensicalness and stupid dumbness. Charged with a passion that I had rarely felt before, I became outrageously charming, and, at the pizza parlor where I was having dinner, I accidentally seduced, and then accidentally got laid by an off-duty personal trainer named Titannia.

Listen to "Philip Goes On a Date!"

"Philip Goes On a Date," short story by me. As read by "Handsomest Man Alive" Kurtis Moyer.

Featuring "Doomed" by M. E. Deutsch

The Kids

Right before we came over the hill, I stopped Abdurehim and told him to be quiet. I pointed to a circle of big dead redwood trees, and we crept around to hide behind them just as a bunch of kids walked by. They were maybe 13, 14.

"You're afraid of those kids?" Abdurehim asked me quietly.

"There's something wrong with the kids that got born during the Ash," I said to him. I waited a few minutes, not really wanting to explain. "They're different. Not scared of anything. And they never say anything. They just give you this look..." I stopped and glanced around. They were gone. "And also ... it's silly, maybe. But when I see those kids I feel almost like I'm guilty for everything, for the war and the Ash and everything. I feel like it's all my fault."

When we got over the hill I felt sort of a deep, powerful exhaustion and I cried a little bit, and I laughed too. They had taken apart the old tents and set them up further up into the old dead forest, because the rising ocean had covered the old downtown and our old town. There were a bunch of tents set up all around, big, sturdy tents made from the good, military-issued canvas, not those "tents" we used to have, which we hammed together from camping gear and garbage bags and scraps of clothes. I could see wires going from tent to tent, and I shook my head in wonder. Santa Cruz had electricity again. There was the pleasant, healthy flurry of movement among those tents, the kind of movement that made me think of children playing, and there was the chatter of lots of voices.

"The sea swallowed up the old town," I told Abdurehim, "It used to be further down there," I pointed. "And there was this building, the Springing Green down there too, where we all had to live during the Ash," I said, mostly talking to myself and trailing off, remembering the old Springing Green with a sudden rush of emotion. I felt a pang of something bitter and sorrowful, and I wondered if anyone remembered the Springing Green, or old Gary Harris. And then I saw it, that old sign, lying against some pile of old bricks and shattered planks of wood. In the bright, fluorescent brightness of the sunlight I could see all the details with a clarity I hadn't had for those five dark years of my life, so the goofy flower cartoons that were printed around the rounded, silly lettering of the words: "SPRINGING GREEN" were almost unrecognizable, while at the same time being maybe more recognizable than anything else in my life.

"You can't go home again," Abdurehim said in his hoarse, soft, heavily accented English. "I don't know what I would feel if I ever saw my Awat Nahiyisis again." And he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. "We'll go down there and tell them what we've got to tell."

And I sighed and replied, "Yes. Let's see exactly how bad an idea this was."

We put our hands behind our heads and walked side-by-side down the rocky, dusty slope slowly, and I called out, "We're friends! We're friends! We surrender! We surrender!" So that they wouldn't shoot at us. At least, that was the hope. They came sprinting out of the tents immediately, lightning-fast, and the surrounded us while staying at a safe distance. Cautiously, one of the group came up and searched us, not even daring to speak to us until they were sure we weren't armed with some bomb or something. And then we were taken to the tents and stripped down to our underwear.

"It's been a long time since I've been in Santa Cruz," I said calmly after letting them get comfortable with the fact that we weren't going to hurt them, "but maybe one of you remembers old Aaron?"

"Oh my God," a woman's voice said. She set down her rifle and pulled off her face mask, and there was Louise Smithson, not a little girl anymore, but surely her all the same. I saw her again, in my mind, a little 6-year-old girl running around the Springing Green playing while us grown-ups stared out the windows watching in horror the first day the Ash fell. She asked, "Are you a ghost?"

"Yes," I said, laughing.

So all the other women backed off and, though they were still warily eyeing Abdurehim, they stopped pointing their rifles in our faces and started asking questions about what was happening in the world outside of Santa Cruz. Maybe they were scared, but they were curious too. I waved my hand to stop them.

"Wait," I said, "tell me. Have you already sent word to the Army that we're here?"

"Of course," Louise said with a little, sort of surprised laugh, "what do you expect? We're at war."

"Listen then," I replied in a different way than before, "because Abdurehim and I can't stay here. The Army is our enemy, and your enemy too. You can't trust them. The U.S. war against the Chinese government is a war for world dominance, and they're using us as their cannon fodder."

The room was silent. Abdurehim gazed at me with that serene look, the one he always gave me when he was scared shitless. I opened my mouth to say something else, to try and tell them what we had seen in New San Francisco during the Peace Revolution Massacre, but then all the young women burst out speaking and yelling all at once.

"Who is he?" One of them demanded, thrusting her rifle in Abdurehim's face, "he looks like a fucking Chinese!"

"The Chinese are the ones who started the war! They're the ones who caused the Ash! The U.S. Army is trying to stop them from killing us all!"

"That's not true," I said calmly, hoping they could hear me over their yelling.

"What do you mean, the Army is our enemy?" Louise was staring hard at me, searching me as if she could read truth on my face. I recognized that hard, intelligent look. She didn't necessarily disbelieve. "Every woman in this room has a husband in the Army."

"No," I said, "your husbands are soldiers, but they aren't in the Army. President Palin changed the Constitution so that none of us are citizens. Legally, the Army considers your men to be mercenaries."

Then there was too much yelling, and I closed my eyes and felt sick to my stomach. I had maybe gone too far, and the whole dialogue was going to be lost in the resulting rush of anger and fear. I looked at Abdurehim, and he smiled at me just a little bit, just as someone smashed the muzzle of a rifle into his face. Stiffly, I crossed the room and got between the gun and my friend and I said, Stop, in a voice so hoarse and hard that the sound nearly broke and died in my throat. "Don't hurt my friend. He didn't do anything to you."

"I'm not Chinese," Abdurehim said nasally, his nose gushing blood, "I'm Uyghur. The old Chinese government conquered my country a long time ago. The New Chinese Authority took me from my home in Awat Nahiyishi, gave me a uniform and sent me here with the orders to kill as many Americans as I could." Abdurehim said all of this slowly, without taking a single breath. He probably thought he was giving his last words again. "I don't want to kill Americans though. I don't believe in war. I learned English at school before the Ash, and so I was able to find friends."

He stopped and gazed around, a sort of panic look coming into his face suddenly because he didn't have anything else to say, to distract or to prolong. No one was moving. They were all staring at him. "Your husbands are being sent to Asia with the same orders as I'd been given." He said after a minute. "Kill as many as you can. Try to break through the civilians and kill the leaders."

"It's a war for global dominance. It won't matter to us who wins," I broke in, now helping Abdurehim to his feet. "We're the ones who have to die so that President Palin can try and take over the world."

Several people were crying. There's something about the sound of someone crying that changes your perception. It's just the human reaction. You look at the person crying in a different way, a more sympathetic way. So I noticed right then that maybe a third of the women crowding around us with guns had big pregnant bellies.

"What are we supposed to do then, old Aaron?" Louise asked in a tone not at all sarcastic or angry. "Not fight back if a troop of Chinese soldiers come here looking to kill as many Americans as they can."

"There's probably hundreds of Chinese living in America now," Abdurehim replied. "They got dropped off by the Chinese military, but they don't want to fight. They want to live."

"I know that you're all scared," I said, a little too pleadingly, "but don't be scared. You're being scared is what allows these people to control you. We need to stop this war before it gets worse. Because sooner or later one side or the other is going to use another Bomb-"

Louise cuts me off. "You say that the Army is the enemy, but during the Ash and afterwards, it was the U.S. government that kept us alive. They kept the water flowing in the pipes." A new tone of resolve was coming into her voice. "If we hadn't of had that water, we all would have died and we wouldn't be having this conversation."

I gazed at her, unsure of what exactly to say. "They're going to finally destroy the world. One more Bomb will turn the planet into the planet Mars. And I bet you that both sides have got a team of scientists working night and day to try and deny that fact."

"Even if you're right, there's nothing we can do," Louise said coldly. "You're just scaring us." She examined me. "Since you're from Santa Cruz, we'll let you go and get a head start on the Army. But don't ever come back here."

We started to go quick, silent. As we went past the last tent, someone called out to us to stop. We turned around and saw the same kids from before, the ones I had hidden from. They came up to us, and one of them said, "You are Uyghur?" to Abdurehim.

"Yes," he said.

"What is it like in your country?" The kid asked.

"We have to get out of here," I said, "the Army will kill him if they find him. And I don't even know what they'd do to me."

"There's no way you'll escape them," the kid told me. "They've got a brand new base, just a few miles south of here. Come with us and we'll hide you."

I didn't care anymore, so I went with them. My adrenaline started to drop, and I started to feel dead inside. What hope did we have? No one believed us. New San Francisco was overrun with U.S. soldiers, and the Peace Revolution leaders had all been killed. The kids led us down to the rocky edge of the water and took us into a little shelter under the rocks. All the while they were asking Abdurehim about Uyghur and China and what it was like to be on a boat. I didn't care to listen, and sat in the dust and groaned.

"Tell them that story you told me about when Pakistan and India had a nuclear war, Abdurehim," I said bitterly. "Tell them about the Peace Revolution Massacre at New San Francisco."

"You were at the Peace Revolution Massacre?" Asked a girl in a sort of hard tone. She couldn't have been older than 14. "I heard about that."

I laughed, staring at the ground. "You don't know what you're talking about. No one has heard about the Peace Revolution Massacre. You're thinking of something else."

"No," she insisted. "I know about it. I read about it on the Internet."

I looked at her in surpris. "What?"

"It's on the Internet," she said. The other kids were nodding and staring at me. "I read that a bunch of the Peace Revolution Movement leaders made it up to Canada and escaped."

"The Internet?" My jaw hung open in shock. "You read it on the Internet?"

"Sure," the girl shrugged. "After they turned the electricity on, we found these old computers."

"But," I was speechless. "Who turned it back on? You get news from the Peace Revolution Movement?"

She shrugged and I looked at Abdurehim.

"How far is it to Canada?" He asked me with a small smile that was not happy or laughing or anything really except proof that there was something worth smiling about. And the kids all stood up and started to gather around, and the little girl who had been speaking came up close to me and stared into my face with her big, sparkling cold eyes and she said, "We'll go, too."

"Wendy At 23" at Hex Ed Journal

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Bugeaters

Some of our young people hate the name, and I guess I should admit that I'm one of the few that ever carried it with a certain amount of pride. I travel a lot these days, now that I'm an old guy and I don't have to worry about Santa Cruz anymore, so I get to meet lots of different people. I tell them that I'm a Bugeater, and usually I get laughed at. It's an insult to most people who had to live through the war and the Ash, I guess, so people tend to think I'm making a joke. But I'm a pretty easy-going guy, so people don't like laughing at me and they'll end up asking me to tell the story of how we got to be called "Bugeaters." And then I'll get really serious and say that once upon a time, being a Bugeater was a matter of life or death, and then I'll tell them.

It was a lazy, easy, warm and pleasant afternoon in late February when Janet Yeager came running into the Springing Green building screaming about the fields, how we had to go out and save the fields. None of us could understand fully what she was saying, since she had her face mask on, but we heard "fields" and were all immediately up and getting into our thick canvas suits and face masks and eye goggles. The war and the resulting Ash had destroyed the ozone layer years ago, and so any trip outside meant covering up from head to toe. I barely had my face mask latched on when I sprinted out into the toxic sunlight and went helter-skelter along the busy, quiet row of tents towards where our fields had been.

I heard screaming, and then I saw it and stopped running. The field was gone, just gone, vanished into a moving, writhing red darkness, the surface of the earth sunken where our nearly 10 dozen precious potato plants had been. That darkness swirled sickeningly, and as I got closer to examine it, what looked like fingers of that mass shot out at me and reached around my leg, sliding up my skin. I jumped back and clasped my calf where I felt the sensation of touch–and immediately there erupted an incredible pain, stinging pain, over and over again, like I was being stabbed. I fell to the ground and began to scramble back away from the pit, calling out to the others to stay back. Several of the guys who had been with me in Springing Green were also being afflicted, and I looked back at the pit and then I realized.

"Ants! It's an ant swarm!" I hollered, "Everyone get away!" And I jumped up, hopping around in pain, swiping at where I could still feel the mandibles digging into my skin, and I led the retreat charge back to Springing Green.

It was a grim scene. Everyone was in mourning over the potatoes. We had barely managed to survive the last brutal, punishing summer. Nothing had grown at all, and we had had to resort to eating our dead again. You could see in everyone's eyes that abject horror. Knowing that we might have to go back to that. It was a horrible, hollow hopelessness. I looked away, disgusted and despairing for my people, and I looked out towards the field and frowned.

"What do we do now, George?" Old Hank asked me in a low voice. "What do we tell them?"

"We start getting ready," I said loudly over the quiet groaning and crying of the townspeople. "There's a hive of hundreds of thousands of hungry insects not a quarter of a mile away from us," I shouted at them all, "probably already blazing a trail here."

None of us had seen any insect since the Ash had fallen, expect for the cockroaches, but after some conferring, we concluded that the ants would be stopped by either heat or water. We didn't have enough scraps to burn, so we decided to go for water. We all hurried out and started digging up a moat. We had been harvesting potatoes long enough to have a small storage of food, but there certainly wasn't enough for feed us for longer than a day or so. So everyone was working with a terrible hunger, and that made some of us slow. Still, there's no greater motivator than the threat of death, and by nightfall the next day we had not only dug up a six-foot deep pit all the way around the Springing Green building, but we had saved up enough of our urine to flood it two feet deep. And we were almost too late, because the scouts had already found us and the first wave of drones had managed to infest the building. There weren't many of them, so we were by no means overwhelmed, and by the time the rest of the hive arrived the moat was there.

Then the ants started to fill up the moat and die. After maybe a half-hour of ants drowning, the tiny corpses had filled up the moat enough that it was almost dry. And they kept coming.

"Fill the moat!" Old Hank yelled, "Use all the water if we have to!" We drew our water from the old municipal pipes, which were still pumping water somehow, nearly eight years after the old U.S. government had disappeared. But we could only draw a small amount at a time and, as we had discovered during those infernal summer months, we could only take so much before the pipes temporarily ran dry. So we refilled the moat, so much so that big masses of dead ants spilled over onto our side of the barrier. And we waited and watched as the ants continued to come and die.

"What now?" Old Hank asked me. I shook my head, and then we just stood there and watched in a kind of quiet, almost reverent, exhausted awe as the ants swarmed, a whole molten landscape of reddish black. Old Hank said in my ear, "Is this how it ends for us? After we survived the war and the damn Ash?" And I just glared at him. After an hour we ran out of water, and then the ants started to fill the moat again. Then the kids started to cry. Due to having been born in the Ash, our kids were the toughest of all of us. When they cried, it was the worst it could get. I was sweating and breathing heavy, pacing around. Everyone was moaning and making these awful, terrified braying noises, like we were a bunch of cows waiting for the farmer. That's what I thought about, right there. I thought about fucking cows. And I started laughing. I was out of my mind. I grabbed a big mass of urine-soaked dead ants and I held it up.

"They can't eat us! We're at the top of this food chain! We'll eat them! We'll eat the God damned ants!" I am still not sure whether or not I was being serious, or if that was my attempt at gallows humor. I was as starved and as desperate as I had maybe ever been in my life. So I started to gnaw on that mass of insect carcasses. And then I threw it aside and dipped my hands into our moat and pulled out a large chunk of ants, some alive, most dead, and I started to bite and chew and swallow. And when it was gone, I went back into the moat to get myself some more.

People started giggling crazily, manic, and they all hurried over to join in. We were all crazy with death and fear and hunger, ready to laugh and scream, and ready to do whatever stupid, crazy, impossible thing might save our lives. Within seconds, everyone in town was digging into the moat and pulling out the masses of ants and eating. No one was under the impression that our efforts could stave off the swarm in the end. It was bravado at the best, and pure craziness at the worst. But then a kid named David Yi thought up the idea of sticking sheets of metal on the ground around the moat. The sun heated the sheets and all the ants that walked on it got overheated and died. Then, once the sheets were filled, we pulled them back over and dumped out the carcasses and slid the sheets back. Doing that allowed us to slow down the flow of the swarm, giving us more time to clear the moat. It took almost two days. When we were thirsty, we took small sips from the moat.

That was as close as we came. Closer than anytime during the Ash, when the biggest threat to our lives was the despair. That swarm would have wiped all trace of Santa Cruz off the map for all time afterwards. People would have stumbled over our bones years later and figured that we had just died like most everyone else had in the Ash, and no one would have known that we had lived through the war and the years and years of Ash and that we had managed to thrive and grow potatoes. We would have just been another tragic smear of dry blood and bones. Those stupid bugs would have been our extinction.

But then the ants stopped coming. All of a sudden we, the Bugeaters, had won our way back to the top of the local food chain. Later on, when the United States government reappeared from wherever they had been hiding in Colorado and finally sent people to help us, their scientists told us that what we had encountered was a freak phenomenon. Several dozen colonies of ants in the former Brazilian rain forests had banded together in order to survive the Ash, and they had been traveling north to try and escape the deadly heat that had destroyed all other life at the Equator. Of course by the time the U.S. government had reappeared, we had years ago captured the hive queens and had built a quite comfortable existence alongside our domesticated colonies of livestock ants. The U.S. government's soldiers had called us "Bugeaters." Like anyone else who had lived through the Ash, we couldn't help but despise those U.S. government people. I've been hearing rumors that there might be another war, that the U.S. government has figured out that some people in China survived as well and, naturally, there's talk of attacking them. It's funny that people like that could look at us, the survivors of the hell they made, as less-than human. Those soldiers looked at us like we were diseased, wretched. It was hard to not give them everything they were looking for.

So I always tell people, with pride, I'm a Bugeater. If they lived through the Ash, and they've heard the stories about the Santa Cruz Bugeaters, then they probably smile and, in their own private way, they understand. And if they didn't have to live through the Ash, then I don't care what they think anyways.

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Panoski's Myth

I broke out in scarlet-yellow lesions all over my face, and for days I couldn't leave the shallow pit that we had dug out years earlier and called "hospital." I thought that I was going to die, so I said goodbye to Julie and told her not to come and see me anymore. Four days later I dragged myself out and demanded food. I was the only one of the twelve of us who got sick to survive. My best guess was that the water pipes, which were still somehow pumping water, even five years after the collapse of the society we had all once lived in, had been tainted. I didn't share my opinion with anyone else, since there wasn't any choice but to keep drinking the water. Anyway, no one else died. After it was clear that I wasn't going to die yet, Julie told me she was pregnant. I hadn't been scared the whole time I was sick ... I probably hadn't been scared for years and years, not of death or illness or pain. But when she told me that, I thought I was going to lose my mind with fear.

My students were wild when I finally got back to the classroom. They had thought that all of the grownups were going to die, and that they were going to be left alone. An air of real, terrible anarchy had grown amongst them. Several of them wanted to leave our "town."

"If you leave, you'll die ignorant and your children will never know their history, or how to read or to do math," I hissed at them with all the authority and aggression I could manage, to scare them back. "And then they might as well be animals."

"Fuck that," George Stannard said with real, trembling blind rage, "this place is death. You want us to stay here and die." He was the oldest boy in the class and one of the smartest, though he concealed it from his peers.

"You'll die if you leave," I said, "and if you aren't here to take care of your parents then they'll die too." And then George shoved me to the ground and left. I found out later that his mother had died from the sickness that almost took me. No one had told me. No one ever talked with one another anymore, not to say "hello" and not to keep each other informed. His mother had been all he had left.

I followed him out, yelling, hoarse with sternness and despair and naked rage. Our "town" was an enclave of tents and dugouts that we had assembled inside of the ramshackle remains of the former "Springing Green" Natural Food Store, in the old downtown of Santa Cruz. A long time ago, right after the Ash, a man from the old government had come and told us that even on days when the Ash was clear, we couldn't be out in the sunlight. The ozone was gone, destroyed by the Ash, and so the sunlight was toxic. I hadn't seen the sun in five years. Numbly I wondered if I was about to see it again, in all its deadly glory, as George stomped up to the old boarded up doorway, and dug his fingers in between the boards and started to pull. I was screaming at him, and all of my students were following after me, I didn't know if they were there to just watch or to go with him, or what, and then the boards gave way and George pulled the door open, and looked out at the gray wasteland of our nothing world. He was struck with silent awe for a moment, and then noticed something on the ground and gasped and jumped backwards, yelping. I hurried over to see what he had seen, to try and pull him away from the outside. There, crouched on the ground in front of the doorway was a human form so shriveled and destroyed that I assumed immediately that it was dead. Then it looked up at us and smiled.

"We can't feed him," Hank said grimly, and I glared at him. "We can't feed ourselves," I said, and Hank snarled at me, "I don't want to starve to death. He was out in the Ash and the UV rays for days probably. He'll be dead of cancer in weeks." And I said so angrily that I tasted iron in my mouth, "He's not dead yet." I didn't know what Hank would say, or what the others would think. After the recent spate of deaths from the tainted water, I was, at 26, the oldest person in our "town." I didn't know if that made me an authority or not.

"I came here to see the ocean," the man said suddenly, wheezing so that his voice was low and barely audible. "I've seen it now. I won't take your food. I just wanted to see the ocean."

I went home and gave Julie my food rations and did not sleep for another night, thinking unwillingly, relentlessly, painfully about what might be growing inside of her belly.

Much later, when he was already long dead, I learned the man's name. He was Panoski.

George hadn't left our "town," but he didn't come to class. I sat at my desk staring at all of them as they copied down the day's lessons. I had them copy all of the books that I could get ahold of, and they would sit for hours and hours all day and copy and copy while I watched on and tried myself to copy and copy. In my mind the only thought I had was that all the books should continue on after we were gone. That's all that mattered to me back then. Occasionally the students would look up at me and gaze for a moment or two before not daring to look anymore. At any minute I expected one of them, maybe Jerry Gethner or Louise Smithson, to get up and walk out, and I was tensed to jump to my feet and show them that I could still put up a fight, that I wasn't one of the dead yet and that I intended them to stay. Not one of them dared, yet.

The light sound of his hand weakly drawing back the canvas flap of our classroom's entrance caused me to nearly jump out of my chair. The man from outside shuffled slowly into the tent and, looking around at all the shocked, scared, tensed children's faces that turned to him, he laughed with a strange sweetness and said to us all, "I hope I'm not interrupting."

I jumped up and took him by his scarred and skinny, grayish arm and led him out. "You'll scare the children," I said with more gentle-ness than I thought I would have had to speak with. "I wanted to know if I could teach the children a music lesson," he said, ignoring what I said, "I was a teacher too, before." He got down with some effort and opened up a guitar case that was caked in Ash from the outside. "I thought they might appreciate some music," he said, looking up at me with that smile, the smile like God was good.

I didn't want him too, but I wasn't used to anyone saying so many words, so I just said nothing and he smiled at me and nodded. I felt dizzy and sick. I hadn't seen someone smile so much for years. He put his hand on my shoulder as he struggled to stand back up with his instrument and he squeezed lightly.

So he played. He was rough and out of practice at first, and the instrument was old and worn. Every note struck me like a blow. And I felt cold beyond cold and did not want at all to hear. Went I got home I gave Julie my rations of food for the fifth straight day in a row, and I spent the night hearing the music he had played, note for note, over and over. I never wanted to see Panoski again. That night when I finally fell alseep, I dreamed of sunlight and my mother and the ocean, shimmering shimmering shimmering. I saw a child reach out from under the overhang of a shielding porch, to feel the rain coming down soft and cold on a winter day. I saw a child stepping gingerly on wet grass. I could smell it like I was there. When I woke up, I felt like screaming. Julie was just beginning to show. I didn't have any hope for whatever sort of child was coming. There was no hope that was at all reasonable to have. I was praying for a miscarriage.

I was late to class and rushed there, my heart knotted with cold fury and silence and resentment so strong and deep that I wondered if I'd be able to stop myself from screaming at my students and trying to beat them if they put up any resistance. And so as I approached the classroom tent and heard Panoski's hoarse, dying, cheerful voice, I felt suddenly, viciously, rabidly that I needed to strangle him to death ... that he was poisoning the young people in the way that he was making me suffer. I found all the kids, George included, sitting around him in a circle, listening silent as he spoke:

"Angry at this affront, God reached down and clapped his hands into the Earth, destroying the nations of India and Pakistan and all of their neighbors. " Panoski clapped his hands together, frowning like the vengeful deity. "And then God looked at his work, and saw that humans still inhabited the planet elsewhere, so he blew the Ash from the land he had destroyed into the atmosphere, to block out the sun and leave us to die in a dead, frozen expanse of Ash." Panoski's voice had dropped to a whisper, and he crouched down and said hoarsely, "But we didn't die, and to show God that we hadn't, we lit candles and raised them up to Heaven. God saw this," Panoski stood back up, inflating his prematurely wizened chest and frowned down at the children theatrically, "And God was angry! Again, he clapped his mighty hands into the Earth, obliterating the nations of Europe. But the candles did not go out. He clapped his mighty hands together over the nation of America. Still the candles did not go out. He sank one mighty fist into the great nation of Russia. And still the candles did not go out, though all the while they wavered. Their light grew dim and looked at times to go out. But the light never died." Panoski noticed me then, and stopped, "Oh," he said, "Hello. I'm sorry. The children asked me to tell them about the war. No one had told them before."

But I couldn't say anything at all, I was sobbing so hard. I couldn't even stand up, I was sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.